We remain so fixated on the external surface being, that we fail to recognise the divinity within us. Just as we go through our daily lives in the light of the day and do not attend to our world’s connection to the vast galaxies and universe of which our world is a part, so also we do not ... Views: 238
One of the limitations of Mind embedded in a physical body is that it tends to fixate on what it can experience ‘here and now’. It has a hard time correlating past, present and future and seeing and understanding trends, directions, trajectories and momentum, other than in specific areas such as ... Views: 151
We live in a time of incredible feats of technological progress. Digital technologies, quantum computing, wireless transmission of energy, solar power, airplane flights, space flight, landing on the moon, instant communications of audio and video content world-wide are things we tend to take for ... Views: 152
Authoritarian states throughout history have understood, intuitively, the power of collective vibration and suggestion. Nazi Germany created a propaganda ministry that had as its goal continuously repeating certain key phrases, to raise up specific emotions and sentiments, and then to enforce ... Views: 160
In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo devotes a chapter to the ‘sevenfold ignorance’. While we are fixated on our external mind, life and body and the life we lead in the external world, we remain ignorant of the forces at work, behind the scenes, to create what we call our being and personality, ... Views: 338
Have you ever wondered how some people seem to go through various situations without a problem while others go through similar situations and have to undergo tremendous challenges and suffering? If someone escapes a harrowing incident once, we tend to call it “luck”. But if it happens repeatedly ... Views: 93
The paradigm that has ruled Western psychology has focused on treating the individual as a discrete entity, separate and apart from everyone else, and independent of his environment. Pressure may be exerted by societal influences, economic influences or family relationships and expectations, but ... Views: 521
The action of the psychic being is subtle, more of an influence than a direct action in the lives of most people who are focused on fulfilling the needs and objectives set by their body-life-mind complex of their external being. The influence can be experienced and felt in the way the external ... Views: 377
If we observe how we tend to respond to provocations from outside, things, events or people who impact our lives, either mentally, emotionally, vitally or physically, we see that the first tendency is to internalize the provocation with a pattern of vibration at one or another level of our ... Views: 375
It is common for an individual to take some kind of illumination of the mind, or some strong positive emotion in the heart, for instance, as a sign of their contact with the soul. Yet in many, if not most, cases the contact is with a mental or vital movement tinged with the influence of the ... Views: 239
When we can once appreciate and accept the fact that forces, unseen by us, unperceived by our senses, can, and do, act upon us, pushing us to act in certain ways, pressing on us to move in certain directions, it is but a small step to recognize that there are beings who inhabit these unseen and ... Views: 165
We can understand the role of genetic predispositions in the formation of the physical body. The transmission of physical characteristics from generation to generation, the blending of dominant and recessive genetic traits and the atavistic background that led to the status of the genetic ... Views: 216
When the astronauts left the planet and were able to look back at Earth from outside, it radically changed their viewpoint. It represented a visceral shock that forced them to see things in an entirely new way from a new perspective.
Analogously, when the shift of standpoint occurs for the ... Views: 243
For those who live their lives on the surface, focused on fulfillment of their external lives, desires and their ego-personality, there is generally no direct knowledge of the existence of the soul. They may accept the idea of a soul without a clear sense of what that implies or means. Or they ... Views: 278
There are many times when people suddenly get a true ‘sense’ or a ‘feeling’ about something that is not directly perceptible to their senses. Sometimes one will feel that someone is watching or following, although the person cannot be seen or heard. There is some inner sense, with a wider and ... Views: 297
We tend to work from the outer to the inner consciousness. We treat the external world as more real and dominant to determine our physical body, our vital nature and our mental development. There is of course a certain amount of truth to this view, inasmuch as the outer and the inner are two ... Views: 1
The highest ideals of humanity can be looked at from the point of view of human capability or from the view of a divine purpose to the manifestation. The difference in viewpoint leads to different focus and result. From the human viewpoint, we would look at how to improve, perfect and optimize ... Views: 646
Our normal human view of things is based in the framing of the mental process which relies on distinguishing differences between one thing and another, between one being and another, between one event and another. This “fragmentation” leads us to focus primarily on the separation we have rather ... Views: 172
Having now referred to the Subliminal Self in our discussion of the creation of dreams, it is necessary to describe this part of our being more thoroughly, and Sri Aurobindo takes up the question. He points out that the subliminal self is not a creation out of the inconscience, but actually it ... Views: 303
At a certain point we come to the conclusion that our minds cannot finally determine the truth or the meaning of our existence. We recognise that many of our daily perceptions and assumptions about the world and, in fact, all of existence, are simply inaccurate. We see the sun rise in the East ... Views: 561
It is not through the power of mind that one achieves knowledge of the truth of existence. The frame within which the mind operates, and the methodology that it utilizes, simply cannot appreciate, nor understand, those aspects of existence which fall outside of its direct scope or which exceed ... Views: 560
While the Bhagavad Gita provides a strong foundation for the spiritual practice of the Integral Yoga, it was developed within a context of time, place and circumstance that brought it to a certain stage of human evolution and potential. Today, the teachings of the Gita remain relevant, but do ... Views: 547
Mental health in the West is generally understood to be a ‘negative’ state, the absence of various forms of disruptions that affect whether and to what extent an individual can conform or fit into the society and meet its expectations. The integral yoga views mental health in an entirely ... Views: 443
The mental intellect receives impulses through the senses, organises them, and trues to determine what is true based on that. It then builds hypotheses, theories and ideation around its assortment of perceptions, memory, and experience based on various principles of symbolic logic that it has ... Views: 509
Until an individual takes up the issue of inner growth and development, whether this is for spiritual progress, mental development, emotional growth, vital discipline or some kind of physical control, he tends to take very little notice of any inner conflict or struggle. He just acts ‘naturally’ ... Views: 319
We tend to imagine that somehow the mind, the vital energy and the physical body we identify through our ego-complex as ourselves, is separate from those of everyone else. In reality, however, the physical, vital and mental substance is universal in nature and the portion we try to wall off ... Views: 259
The body has its own consciousness and much of its operation takes place without active mental intervention. However, there is also a serious interaction that takes place so that the mental power can influence, guide, train, direct and otherwise gain at least some control over certain aspects of ... Views: 302
We see many examples through time of individuals who began a spiritual quest with good intention and who later came to grief as they got caught up in the snares of what Sri Aurobindo calls the ‘intermediate zone’. When we leave behind the safety and security of the external consciousness and its ... Views: 332
Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between what he terms the ‘intermediate zone’ and a number of intermediate stages in the development of consciousness. The distinction is important. The intermediate zone is a transitional phase as the normal human mind-life-body begins to experience the influx of ... Views: 486
As science begins to recognise the fact that there are ranges of vibration outside of the limited scope that we can normally experience, and that countless reports of perceptions that are inexplicable based on the outermost physical reality that we have heretofore treated as our sole reality, we ... Views: 159
Is there a purpose or significance to life and the evolution of consciousness? Who is responsible for this process, and how does it take place within the complexity of a unified whole that has innumerable constituent elements interacting with one another to create the world we live in and the ... Views: 576
The soul makes choices along the way and in so doing, it builds up the psychic being as it grows, evolves and passes through a series of births and deaths of the physical existence. The Jivatman represents the Divine Consciousness presiding over each individual formation within the manifestation ... Views: 311
We live in the world without fully appreciating or understanding it. This is not something new that we are experiencing, but a statement of what we may call the ‘human condition’. The Rishis of the Rig Veda faced these same issues. In the Hymn of Creation, Mandala X, Sukta 129, Verses 6 and 7 ... Views: 31
When we work in the external world, whether it is to study, to follow up a line of development of some sort, to train the body for athletic endeavours, to strengthen and refine the mind to undertake serious development of the powers of Reason and intuition, etc., we do so with some expectation ... Views: 236
We generally rely on the information provided by our senses to understand the world we live in. This information, however, is subject to misperception and misinterpretation, leading us to vastly distort the truth of what we ‘know’. For countless years, most of humanity believed that the sun ... Views: 514
The opening and activation of the subtle energy centres described in the Tantras and known generally as Kundalini Yoga, differs from the practices of integral Yoga as to process, but not necessarily as to the end result. In both cases, the subtle centres, or chakras, are opened and energy is ... Views: 509
It is difficult, if not impossible, for the mental awareness to understand experiences of consciousness outside of the mind’s normal ranges of operation. Just as we now recognise that our visual perceptions are framed within a range, and that other beings can actually see things we cannot see, ... Views: 583
In recent years there has been a lot of focus on what is called the ‘law of attraction’. It has been mainly used to act as some kind of a ‘wish-fulfilling action’ that one undertakes by focusing on specific affirmations or visualizing results which then are ‘attracted’ to your focus and create ... Views: 28
As with physical laws and laws of physics, laws of nature, there are laws of occultism which operate when there is vital interchange between people on an occult level. Knowledge of these laws is essential both to protect oneself and to ensure that occult powers are not being misused or ... Views: 182
It is easy to see the failings of others, while overlooking the issues within oneself. Jesus in his famous Sermon on the Mount, recounted in the New Testament of the Bible, exhorted his followers to not judge others but to look within, and noted ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy ... Views: 360
We believe we have free will. We are confronted with choices and make a decision and carry it out and believe that this decision was made freely by the individual we identify as ourself. At the same time, we can recognise the step-wise development which is called ’cause and effect’, or the law ... Views: 233
Worship of an external deity, an avatar, savior or enlightened being is recognised as a sign of religious dedication on the part of an individual. In many instances, however, this form of worship is a more or less empty ritual that is part of a societal expectation or norm, or operates as a ... Views: 408
No matter how highly develop and powerful the intellect is, at some point it reaches the limits of its power and acknowledges that all of its activity is limited within a frame that prevents it from knowing anything with certainty. The intellect builds steps of logic based on various assumptions ... Views: 576
One of the greatest difficulties we face in trying to understand the operation of hidden or occult forces in life is the limitations on our ability to perceive and to know what is actually taking place. Each aspect of our being has its own way of “knowing”. For our lives in the external world we ... Views: 207
The mental knowledge we acquire is mostly a form of ignorance reaching out to try to acquire knowledge. In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo describes the various forms of knowledge. With one exception, they are set up in the paradigm of subject, object and the process of knowing, and treats the ... Views: 314
The development of the mental consciousness has brought about enormous changes for life on earth, and as the foremost species utilizing the mental consciousness, humanity has taken the mind to limits never before considered as possible. Advances in logic, science, philosophy, psychology, ... Views: 447
During the evolutionary development of the ascending powers of consciousness, the action of the soul is to provide an influence from behind, while the primary attention is fixated on the needed development of the powers of the external being, body, life and mind. This severely limits the direct ... Views: 204
When we reflect on what we mean by prayer, and what expectations we have for it, we can determine both the limits and the uses of prayer in navigating our way through life, and obtaining results aligned with our aspirations. In the USA it is common for people to send “thoughts and prayers” for ... Views: 98
In his epic poem Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, Sri Aurobindo writes: “Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world; The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed; Heavy and long are the years our labour counts, And still the seals are firm upon man’s soul And weary is the ancient ... Views: 304
We have a physical being, we have a vital energy including nervous energy, moral force and emotional energy, and we have a mental nature which includes thought, reasoning powers, and formulation of thought into word or deed. The vital force acts on its own plane as well as utilizes the physical ... Views: 199